Hearing about what use to be a tradition in Japanese cinema with a guy on the side explaining things sounds like something I noticed Eastern Europe did a lot with foreign movies and TV programs were very often they use a “lector” to translate what was said in during the program. These people don’t seem to have much use for subtitles or proper dubbing in their societies.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilov_translationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benshi

The side subtitle thing done in Gunhed reminded me of a segment in “Robot Carnival” where a character that spoke English had the same thing occur as well during his dialogue.